Installing the separate levels
Extract the zip and enter the directory, copy everything (levels, textures, etc) into the original YoFrankie BGE folder released on the DVD or downloaded on-line.
You can start YoFrankie from the menu and these levels will be available from the small level selector world.

These levels will be included with the next release of YoFrankie which will be updated for Blender 2.49.

BugsAll the levels have some glitches that need to be resolved. Since this competition is for level design, I accept that level logic and scripts will need tweaking, this can be worked out before inclusion in the next release.

*Update* The levels are now in the subversion repository with all the other YoFrankie files.
If you have svn installed grab them with “svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/yofrankie”, or with tortoisesvn on windows.

Its close to release and were finalizing the levels, cleaning up the files and removing smaller glitches. however there are some things that we didn’t post about because we were too busy.
Behind the exciting GLSL shaders, along with the funny animations and pretty scenery we did manage to get some gameplay in.
Here’s a video of the game Chris and myself recorded, showing some of the gameplay you can expect to see.

It might also come as news to some of you that you can play a second player – Momo – Thanks to Moraes Junior ‘mangojambo’ for making the character and all animations to match Frankies.

As on special request (thanks for the hint Bart!) I decided to organize a small party for the last Apricoters (Chris & Pablo & Brecht). Just intimous, for those who were involved and dropping in regular anyway! But nevertheless, it was awesome and give the team the right incentive and drive to make the final presentation a perfect premiere!

In the vimeo clip you can see a complete 6 minute walk-through the main game levels. This, plus more goodies is going to be finalized on the DVD. Hopefully in 2 weeks it’s ready for print. End of september we then can ship it to everyone!

The main priority for game engine drawing at this point is optimization. We’re trying to get the Blender game engine version of the game to run on as many computers as possible, as long as the graphics card supports GLSL. Different graphics cards and drivers can give quite different results, so to get a clear overview of where the issues are, we need your help! We’ve prepared a .blend file that outputs graphics card information and performance statistics. It’s the same as the demo posted earlier, with some small modifications, so it’s not indicative of the graphics or performance in the final game, but it tests the different features. All you need to do is open it in a recent Blender build of the Apricot branch, look for builds of revision 15606 or newer. Such builds can be found on:

Then it is simply a matter of pressing the “P” button and waiting for the test to finish, which should take less than a minute. Don’t hide the window or move other windows over it, this can influence the benchmark. If all goes well, a .txt file will written next to the .blend file. Then paste the contents in the comments, it should look something like this:

If something goes wrong, screenshots, errors from the console or backtraces are welcome. If you want to paste long texts, please use PasteAll. Let’s try to keep the comments clean to get a nice overview of the different graphics cards and do project discussion and feature requests in other blog posts. Thanks!

Today we setup a read only mirror of the database were using here in the studio that will be synchronized daily.
This contains all the content created for apricot so far. The initial download size is large but updating will not take so long.

Blender Game Engine

These files can be played with the blender game engine alone.
You’ll need a recent version of blender apricot branch – www.graphicall.org Chris's level "svn://download.blender.org/pro/bge/levels/level_1_home.blend"